[rubicon33]

Honest to god, how hard do you think his job really is? How much of it simply comes down to just brokering connections afforded to him by his position? It's not like he's responsible himself for generating truly novel and useful engineering deliverables. I seriously struggle to see how he possesses some talent that warrants his pay, vs. just being a lucky sob in a world where boards will shell out ridiculous checks on faith alone that if they don't, earnings will suffer.

[opportune]

Pay is not about how hard any job is. My job is not nearly as hard as many people who make much less than me. It’s about the supply and demand of the role and how much value someone in the role can generate (which you can think of as an upper bound on pay). When you’re making decisions for >100k people earning >$100B/year it’s easy to argue that the person trusted with that much responsibility provides that much value.

I personally don’t think Sundar is an amazing CEO. He is very conservative and boring. But at the same time Google has tended to be too reckless and fund many projects with speculative ROI, or with no cohesive strategy. Google is making the shift to selling to enterprise and government where a level-headed conservative CEO inspires a lot more confidence than an ambitious reckless one. Also, they have one of the greatest businesses ever to exist (search ads) which, compared to any other >$100bb business, is a lot more precarious: it’s not contingent on long term enterprise contracts or lock-in or a physical moat (supply chain, brick and mortar presence).

His job is to keep the golden goose laying eggs and to make sure Google succeeds the transition to enterprise software. Believe it or not he’s more qualified for the job than all the other SVPs at Google and because he’s well connected with the founders he’s not a wildcard like an outsider would be.

[QuarterReptile]

The correct analogy is sports, so if you're comparing CEO pay to salaried SWEs rather than European football stars, you're going to distract yourself.

Team Google is a juggernaut with the funds to match, so they see value in putting up the money to get the top performer. They don't care how much luck the guy had to get where he is or how fair the pay is. They operate at a scale where small performance gains mean huge impact, so getting the guy who can make things go well (or who is less likely to drive the whole org off a cliff) is a bargain at any price. And let's not pretend we all know how to be CEOs of giant companies.

[cudgy]

No one knows how to be CEO of a giant company until they do it, but there are many better qualified people that could perform that job for a whole lot less money. One could argue that taking such a huge pay increase immediately before laying off thousands of people is an example of poor CEO decision making skills, resulting in a loss of goodwill to the employees and potential future hires. The temporary $99 a night hotel deal for employees is an equally vivid middle finger to employees.

[refurb]

Honest to god, how hard do you think his job really is?

It's like a plumber coming over and hitting a pipe with a hammer and charging you $300. You paid $5 for the effort and $295 for the knowledge of where to hit the pipe.

I mean how hard is software engineering? Should people be paid $500k? Garbage collectors work harder than most FAANG engineers I know.